The Ten Elements Of The Perfect Landing Page

I attended Bryan Eisenberg’s keynote about landing page optimization at HeroConf, an all PPC conference in Austin last month. He had some really actionable advice for landing page design so I thought I’d share the highlights here. You can check out Bryan’s presentation titled “Developing a High Converting Landing Page” on his site.

On Why Landing Pages Are Often Broken…

Most companies bring $92 to bring traffic to their site but only $1 to convert them.

Most sites don’t have a traffic problem, they have a conversion problem.

Many marketing teams suffer from the curse of knowledge: they bring their own knowledge about the product and try to sell it to people who know nothing about it.

On What A Great Landing Page Experience Needs To Be…

A landing page needs to be all of the following. Start from the top of the list and only if you meet the criteria, move on to the next one.

$44B is lost in e-commerce due to issues with just the first item on this list…

On What Landing Pages Need To Address Depending On Various Stages Of The Buying Cycle…

early awareness – solution may be to define a problem for the consumer

mid / consideration – solution may be a buying guide

purchase – solution is to provide a sign up or shopping cart

post purchase – solution may be ways to engage with the product

On How Many Test You Should Do…

Amazon did 1900 tests in 2013. So no, you’re probably not doing enough.

The Conversion Trinity: What You Need To Convert

Relevance

Value

CTA

The Ten Elements Every Landing Page Must Have:

Logo

Headline

text

graphical

Offer

Descriptive Copy

bullet block

key features

key benefits

Product / service presentation

product image

tours

screenshots

lifestyle images

Call to action

Confidence building

testimonials

examples of users

3rd party validators

Contact info

Link to more info

Template elements

How To Prioritize These Ten Key Elements

You need to be careful about the page layout and make sure the page flows well and the users’ attention is drawn primarily to the right things.

Employ the visible anatomy which has 5 dimensions:

Relevance – reinforce the keywords in the title so you preserve the scent of the query

Quality – the page needs to look like it’s high quality – if you add too many trust badges, your site may look desperate to try and prove legitimacy and actually have worse conversion rate because it will be perceived as low quality

Placement

Proximity

Prominence

You should prioritize 3 key sections to have great placement, proximity to other key sections, and prominence on the page:

call to action

choose any of the remaining 9

choose any of the remaining 8

Then run a heatmap study and compare the heatmap to the anatomy you created. Your 3 priority elements should match where the users are looking. If not, iterate to fix this.

If you ever have a chance to see Bryan in person, I highly recommend it.

Frederick Vallaeys was one of the first 500 employees at Google where he helped grow the AdWords search marketing system and served as Google’s AdWords Evangelist, teaching advertisers about which Google products are best to support their marketing goals. He was a key player on several of the teams that made AdWords into the leading platform for search marketing, including the team that started the AdWords Editor and the one that acquired Urchin (now Google Analytics).
He has contributed his technical expertise to several AdWords books including bestsellers like “AdWords for Dummies,” “Advanced Google AdWords,” and “Quality Score in High Definition” and he writes a monthly blog for searchengineland.com.
He helps advertisers improve their search marketing results through Optmyzr.com, an AdWords tool company that makes a Historical Quality Score Tracker, One-Click AdWords Optimizations and other tools to make account management more efficient.